Since February...

Back in February I wrote a quick post apologizing for my general lack of attention to my blog. In that post I mentioned that:

It seems that keeping up a blog while holding down a full-time job, starting two companies, getting ready for ERE, co-authoring an article for ERE's Corporate Recruiting Leadership Journal, advising a couple of start-ups and writing a book is harder than I thought.

Well, it has been about 4 months, so here is a quick update:

• ERE was great fun (I highly recommend the next confab this fall). I talked three times and think I probably sucked (people don’t generally give you feedback so I have to rely on my own harsh self-evaluation). But it was a great honor to be sharing the stage with luminaries such as Cindy Haugh, Susan Burns, Heather Hamilton, Mike Homula and Dave Lefkow.
• Just before ERE Susan and I published our article in the ERE Journal. I liked it, but haven’t gotten any feedback whatsoever, so for all I know, that sucked too (not Susan’s part – just mine). I am hoping to post it here on Talentism sometime in the future and get your feedback.
• One of the companies crashed and burned on the runway, which is difficult in aviation but fairly common in the world of start-ups (although there has been talk of trying to get the passengers out alive and into another plane – more on that to come later).
• The book is actually going along well. Working with Dave is a blast and the topic is something we are both passionate about, so nothing to complain about there.
• As you can read here, I am having a good time at EA during my day job (obviously I have time to burn between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m.).
• That leaves the last company, which unlike the suckage reported in other parts of this update, has actually gone along quite swimmingly.

So swimmingly, in fact, that Dashnote (the name of the company) is almost ready to announce to the world. Before the parade and the full-page ad in the New York Times (yeah right) I thought I would share it with a couple of my cloests friends. But they wouldn't return my calls, so I guess I'll share it with you instead.

And just to show everyone that it isn’t vaporware you can actually try it for yourself. Over in the upper right-hand corner of this page you will see a button that says “Comment on this site.” Just give it a click and see what happens. The idea behind the software is that it allows people to maintain websites without employing the common yet burdensome and ugly process of having users taking screenshots and sending huge appended MS Word files to sys admins. We figured there had to be a better way in a Web 2.0 world to exchange such information, and after getting over some steep technical hurdles, we found out we were right.

It struck me about half-way through the development process that Dashnote (www.dashnote.com) is a way that I could create a richer web experience on Talentism. Dashnote allows Talentism’s readers to highlight specific phrases and paragraphs and ask me specific questions, or provide specific comments. Those comments that are good can be posted back to the blog. Those that are personal or silly can be addressed directly.

We even have a feature (which I will introduce next week) that allows you to set a Dashnote bookmark so that you can go to any webpage and load the Dashnote service and comment on the page that you are on, even if that page doesn’t use Dashnote. In this way you could be on a recruiting.com page and have something you want to have me address on Talentism and simply highlight it and comment on it. Again, more on that next week.

I hope that you will help us out and click on the “Comment” button. I would love to have your feedback on Dashnote and the idea in general (and what better way to do that than use Dashnote?).

A couple of caveats (of course): First, we are in alpha stage test, so please be patient as the comment box loads and transfers data. Second, we haven’t secured the transmission yet, so your comments may be intercepted by some nefarious individual who wants to capture public information in transmission (I didn’t say the hacker had to be bright, just nefarious). We will be locking everything down with SSL / HTTPS in the next couple of weeks. Also, please pardon any bugs, especially in MS IE. And finally, any comment you send me may be used on the site (unless you specifically tell me not to). If you want to have your comment attributed please type your name in the text box along with your comment (otherwise I might not know who sent it).

Your comments, questions and concerns are always welcome! Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Comments

[Rob McIntosh]

Jeff – I read and enjoy everything you write but don’t comment on all.

Dashnote - Nice idea that could catch on. Will be watching with interest.

Tried the box but nothing loads. I am reasonably technically savvy but I don't have a solution to why a left mouse click does not work when used to select :-(

[Jeff Hunter]

Thanks Rob. I appreciate the readership. I have gotten several emails telling me that Dashnote does not load. It may take about 30 seconds to load, so be patient. But we are also looking into it on our side. Again, thanks!

[martin snyder]

Looks like it worked for me. The red dashed box did not line up well with text I was selecting. The popup was blank for about 10 seconds with no sign of work being done. I like the idea of an instant comment box grabbing and marking up a page. An auto-Fisker so to speak ;-)

I'm not looking forward to the over Fisked world of tommorow though....

[Heather]

Argggh, stop with the self-loathing! Accept that fact that you are great, Jeff. None of us are good at everything. ; )

[TabathaOster]

Awesome blog. Peace out until next time TabathaOster